Made Real Stories

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Learning to Be Human was a
commissioned piece as part of an anti-bullying campaign for the North
London Collegiate School Jeju in South Korea. In the game, an Android
protagonist helps players understand and help improve the lives of
bullies, victims, and even bystanders when they choose to spend their
days with the different characters. Because these experiences are so
personal and engaging while offering students chances for change,
students can better absorb and identify with the lessons presented.

Creating this game required research
into local Korean student culture, research into strategies for
change, and of course, a delicate strategy for making a game fun.

An
educational anti-bullying game has to do everything, and do everything
well. It has to be accurate, engaging, and polished. If any of those
things slip, the game falls apart quickly. I made sure that didn't
happen by avoiding those all-too common pitfalls.

I would like to address the fact that I
wrote a socially conscious game about a South Korean social issue,
despite the fact that I'm white, I live in USAmerica. I want to
acknowledge and own the fact that I am writing to an experience I
have never had, and can never have. My racial and cultural difference
means that, even though I worked hard to get things right when
creating this game, there are aspects that I might have gotten wrong.
Because of that, if any of my work was insensitive or incorrect, I
welcome the opportunity to make corrections. All that said, making
sure the game felt culturally real took a lot of work.

The bullying problems and their solutions needed to be portrayed accurately in order for the game to be at all effective. This meant research into how bullying works, and what can be done to stop bullies and empower victims.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Making The Sea Eternal was a
monumental undertaking. Its goal was to give players a rounded
experience that feels both immersive and player-directed. I wanted to
create a world where the players were dealing with realistic
characters that had needs that sometimes conflicted, and asked the
player how they wanted to sort through those different issues, in a
way that felt organic and natural. That took a lot of words (nearly
300,000*) and a whole lot of testing, editing, and polishing. But I'm
really proud of the way everything came together.

I've documented the different aspects
of design that went into pulling this all together down below, as
well as some aspects of the game design that mattered to me:

Note: This post deals with my game The Sea Eternal. As such, it will contain spoilers.

This game required pulling a lot of
different elements together seamlessly to create a realistic fantasy
ocean setting, and ended up requiring a lot of research into
oceanography, marine biology, and mythological creatures. I ended up
dividing my research up into sections.

My first area of research focused on
the very human aspect of enjoying the ocean, specifically SCUBA
diving. A lot of people actually do swim around the ocean, and
there's a special feel and knowledge to diving that I wanted to make
sure I captured since I've been snorkeling a long time ago, but never
diving. So I watched diving videos, looked up popular diving spots,
and even went through an encyclopedia of diving lingo. A lot came out
of that with regards to the creatures, the colors, the snow, the
visibility, and the ocean wreck.

Note: This post deals with my game The Sea Eternal. As such, it will contain spoilers.

Planning was a huge part of getting
ready for working in ChoiceScript. Because writing in ChoiceScript is
just using a text editor, I find that lack of structure can lead to
programming issues if I just jump right in.

So I planned the whole game out using
Twine first. Here's a screenshot of a very early iteration of the
game. You'll see that it's not a functional game, since there aren't
really any links between boxes. But it's a representation. It's kind
of an outline or even... pseudocode. Documenting a choice game with a
flow chart allows the game to be represented like the actual game
it's going to be. Thorough documentation like this really helps frame
the game: where is everything going, how, and why?

The Main Site

Developer Notes for my Games

About Me

I love using games for their ability to tell unique and amazing stories that make us think about ourselves. I have a tendency towards the dark and mysterious, but I also firmly believe that games can be used to help improve our lives and increase awareness and empathy.